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Alison Crockett - The Return Of Diva Blue: On Becoming A Woman Redux (Sol Image) Comentários: "Alison Crockett's acclaimed "On Becoming A Woman" album gets the remix treatment from a crew of top flight producers including DJ Spinna, Yam Who?, Phil Asher, Mark De Clive-Lowe, Waiwan, Landslide and more. Sure to endear Alison to the house music community as well as satisfy her long time fans."

Andy Stott - Merciless (Modern Love) Comentários: "Merciless" is the debut album from Manchester's Andy Stott and is released on the city's own Modern Love label. Having only been making music for a little over two years, Stott has nonetheless accrued a vast catalogue of tracks - with "Merciless" meticulously distilled from over a hundred pieces of music championed by BBC Radio One's Mary Anne Hobbs, Andy Stott is one of a select few to have been invited back to complete a second session for her Breezeblock show. A Mercedes car-painter by day, Andy Stott's ascent has been astonishingly quick and gained early momentum as his unique combination of crisp beats and fragile melodies combined to mint a sound that was informed by a spectrum of styles, yet remained charmingly idiosyncratic in execution. Obsessed with music since the age of nine, Andy began learning riffs off hardcore tunes by ear - soon tiring with the genre and shifting his focus to the twin maxims of hip hop and drum & bass. Pinpointing the exact moment he decided that making music was his calling as "1995 - when Mark (Claro Intelecto) played me "Metapharstic" by Aphex Twin and it blew my fucking head off!" Stott immediately commenced a run of piano lessons and bought a Roland-10 which is still in working-order to this day. Consuming records that ranged from the likes of LFO, Autechre and Kraftwerk through to Harold Budd, Jedi Knights and Depeche Mode, Andy soon breached the limitations placed on him by the constraints of his equipment and branched out into the computer market - finding software that could help him render any sound his imagination could muster. Rising to prominence on a similar trajectory to Modern Love's Claro Intelecto, Andy Stott's evolution as an artist seems entwined alongside his label-mate - with the pair recently beginning to play live together and the closing track "Peace Of Mind" from "Merciless" being a stripped down piano cover of a Claro original... Ranging from gnarled dubstep and solipsistic strings, through to treated piano and bleached tech - "Merciless" seemingly quashes the age-old adage that a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none with Andy conquering a myriad of styles whilst instilling each piece with a distinctive fingerprint that marks them out as Stott. Mercilessly put together with a delineated narrative, "Merciless" clocks in at a little over forty minutes and in doing so harks back to the days of classic vinyl LPs where an album could be readily consumed in one sitting. Opening through a cold-water batch of sprawling strings, "Merciless" kicks off with "Florence" wherein a widescreen vista is brought down to piquant level of detail as thundering piano juxtaposes perfectly with a compacted batch of tech-fingered beats. From here we're taken on a messy journey through a twilight landscape, as the powdery rhythms of "Edyocat" give way to "Choke" and its grazed-knee take on dubstep, before "Hi-Rise" lightens the mood through some carbonated beats and analogue melodies."

Zero DB - Bongos, Bleeps & Basslines (Ninja Tune) Comentários: Since they started properly working together some 6 years ago, Chris Vogado and Neil Combstock (aka Zero dB) have been concocting a provocative, innovative and addictive brew of hard jazz, electro, Latin, hip hop and house, laced throughout with their now signature dirty, heavy basslines. After releasing their early records on Vogado's own Fluid Ounce label, Zero dB are now signed to Ninja Tune and ready to step it up, with their debut album, "Bongos, Bleeps and Basslines". Their main starting point is usually jazz, but they dip into a multitude of different influences and work with talented musicians and vocalists to create a track. In contrast to the general climate of somewhat old, tired, formulaic and unmemorable dance music, Zero dB's meticulous production forces their audiences to discover previously undeveloped musical places. "A Pomba Girou" kicks off BB&B by combining disorientating echo with ridiculously fat electronic bass styling and the kind of rhythm designed to get the hips twitching. Title track "Bongos, Bleeps & Basslines" eschews the usual "nice" factor inherent in all things proto-jazzy, taking the music's rhythmic drive and harnessing it to earth-rumbling bass noises and enough squelching and bleeping to fill a large aerodrome with monged-out ravers. "Conga Madness" is Latino-space music, a pummelling, hard-as-nails rhythm. "Know What I'm Saying?" heads in a slower, more hip hop-influenced direction, verbals being beautifully delivered by Pase Rock, sometime member of Five Deez and regular Spank Rock collaborator. "Coisa De Gringo" returns to the production pair's love of turbo-charged, cyber-punk Latin, combining raw bass with a true musicality which elevates the tune to levels of euphoria it couldn't manage by use of rhythm alone. Heidi Vogel adds the requisite sweetness, the delicacy of her vocal perfectly offsetting the drive of the music. "Anything's Possible" is a super-mellow chunk of hip hop that draws on the classic early nineties school of Premier and Pete Rock, the finishing rap touches from New Orleans native Voice, whose cool school styling and thoughtful lyrics place her in the tradition of Bahamadia, Ladybug and What What? "Te Quiero" builds with all the beautiful self-evidence of classic house music, a variety of influences thrown into the blender in order to produce something pumped up and downright evil enough to blow away any of the froth which usually passes for Latin-influenced dance music. "On the One & Three" keeps the flick knife hip shimmies going right to the end, where "Sunshine Lazy" rounds things off in epic style with sweaty, drowsy, hot weather psych r&b. The result is hard-edged and exhilarating, a record which is destined never to end up on the Starbucks stereo. Not least because it would blow up the woofers.

CASSIUS - 15 Again (Virgin Germany)

CASBAH 73/Various - Jazz Travels (Hitop Spain)

Gruppo JAZZ MARCA - Mitteleuropa (Arision)

Scissor Sisters - Ta-Dah (Polydor)

The Rapture - Pieces Of The People We Love (Mercury)